MASSACHUSETTS — As inter-imperialist rivalry and the worldwide capitalist crisis continue to deepen, the U.S. ruling class is forcing the government to restructure public schools, healthcare, and other public services, like the Post Office. Its twofold goals are to enforce cutbacks and centralize control. These cutbacks in higher education severely effect working-class students’ access to colleges and universities. After the revolts in universities in the 1970s and 1980s, the ruling class created community colleges to appease the masses. This tricked many working-class students, including immigrants, into believing they were getting a piece of the “american dream.”
Now, as the needs of the ruling class are changing, working-class students are under attack. The bosses no longer need as many workers with college degrees. The government is more tightly controlling local institutions and intimidating workers in community colleges. For bosses to gain maximum profits and control, options for many working-class students are limited to either a low-paying job, or the military for benefits and the lie of secure employment and/or citizenship.
Restructuring public community colleges to serve corporations more efficiently is one way the U.S. ruling class is trying to boost its profitability. More importantly, the bosses need to control the colleges to reproduce the racist, sexist inequalities and the ideologies to justify it. By using their state power in this way, they expose themselves as a class dictatorship rather than a democracy.
Governor Deval Patrick takes his marching orders from the ruling class to restructure the community colleges. He is relying on the Boston Foundation (BF), a liberal think tank, to plan and execute it.
In 2011, the BF issued a report entitled: “The Case for Community Colleges:  Aligning Higher Education and Workforce Needs in Massachusetts.”  BF has assets of $860 million spread out among hundreds of non-government organizations (NGOs) set up to serve the ruling class, whether these employees know it or not. Local politicians and administrators, who serve the bosses and want to maximize profits in local industries, tightly control NGO leaders.
By limiting working-class students’ access to education and training with low-level certificate programs under the “workforce development” agenda, a larger pool of contingent labor is created. These students are to work for low pay without unions or decent benefits. This opens the door to diminishing wages and working conditions for all workers. The push towards vocational education has created what is known as the “Crisis in Higher Public Education.”
With a national perspective, the BF report applauds community college systems that are “doing a good job” of complying with bosses that could be “models for reform” here. Corporations work through the government and foundations to develop the desired workforce.
Forbes lists Virginia as the best state for business due in part to its investment in workforce development programs. Virginia leadership assigns the task of “saving the middle class” to their community colleges, slowly chipping away the few choices these students have.
Washington State was the first to systematically implement “performance based metrics.” This means offering financial rewards for the community colleges who achieve milestones set by the state board and denying or limiting funding to those community colleges who do not comply. “A college’s ability to achieve these success points has an impact on its basic funding allocation from the state” the report reads.
This “carrot-and-stick” approach to governance has already been implemented by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education in some instances since the 1990s. This means funding hinges on complying with the bosses’ agenda. The ruling class is preparing for more centralized control of our class, as it prepares for greater war in the Middle East.
The BF report attacks community colleges as being “uncooperative and hard to work with,” blaming them for failures in the educational system as well as for unemployment and underemployment here. It calls for fascistic tactics of bullying and terror to control staff and faculty at community colleges by threatening to withhold funding for jobs and programs if the schools fail the “performance metrics.” These metrics are the yardstick that will punish the college workers who cannot measure up to imposed state standards.
However, attacks on education hurts students the most, as they are forced to accept cutbacks and fed anti-communist ideology. Models with reduced or accelerated developmental education are praised by the BF report for helping to boost graduation rates. This limits working-class youth’s access to college-level education, and feeds into institutional racism by holding down the most vulnerable of our working-class sisters and brothers:  black and latino urban youth.
PL’ers are participating in a union committee that aims to give leadership to the faculty, staff, and students to fight back against the ruling class’s’ plans to vocationalize the community colleges.  We are also participating in a newly formed caucus, Educators for a Democratic Union, which is dedicated to fighting back against the attacks on working-class students and teachers.  Through this work, we are meeting people who we can introduce to PLP’s idea.
PLP needs to win faculty and students to understand that the restructuring of the community colleges is not a response to a temporary crisis, but rather a response to an unsolvable contradiction of the capitalist system that will require fascism to stay afloat. Under capitalism, competition forces technological advancement, putting millions out of work. The capitalist’s ability to produce outpaces their ability to sell what they produce. This causes mass unemployment, underemployment, economic crisis, and war to become permanent features of society.
A reform in education is a restructuring of a capitalist institution in order to better control our class. We must build a worker-student alliance in order to fight against these cutbacks and control. In the struggle, PL’ers can win college workers and students to destroy this system that churns out racism and sexism, and build an egalitarian society: communism.